A team of researchers led by Dr. Hernán Makse, professor of physics at The City College of New York (CCNY), has shed new light on the way that information and infectious diseases proliferate across complex networks. Writing in Nature Physics, the…
Many scientists in academia bemoan the fact that their lifestyles do not allow them to have as many children as they would like. Surprisingly, male scientists harbor more regrets than female scientists, according to a study by Rice University sociol…
Scientists can now study climate change in far more detail with powerful new computer software released by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo.
The Community Earth System Model will be one of the primary clim…
fire thought of as the quintessential human invention. Now scientists have found that emerging, more energy efficient lighting technologies could be the key to a better quality of life.
New research published today, Thursday, 19 August, in a spec…
COLLEGE STATION, Aug. 18, 2010 — Much like quiet, middle-aged baby boomers peacefully residing in some of the world’s largest cities, families of some galaxies also have a hidden wild youth that they only now are revealing for the first time, acco…
The National Research Council (NRC) has strongly recommended the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) as one of NASA’s next two major space missions, to start in 2016 in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA). LISA will study the un…
In a discovery that is likely to impact fields as diverse as atomic physics, chemistry and nanotechnology, researchers have identified a new physical phenomenon, electrostatic rotation, that, in the absence of friction, leads to spin. Because the electric force is one of the fundamental forces of nature, this leap forward in understanding may help reveal how the smallest building blocks in nature react to form solids, liquids and gases that constitute the material world around us.
Chicago physicists are set to announce they’ve successfully used multiple beams of light to selectively sort microscopic particles, biological cells and large molecules. Manipulating these beams of light has led to one of the newest techniques in microfluidics, the science of transporting fluids through networks of miniature channels. University of Chicago Physics Professor David Grier calls the new technique “optical fractionation,” because it involves using light to sort one fraction of objects from another.
Marlan Scully, the Texas A&M University professor who applied quantum physics to the automotive engine and came up with a design that emits laser beams instead of exhaust, has been tinkering under the hood again. This time, he’s sized up the perfect engine — and improved it. Scully, known as the “Quantum Cowboy” for his innovations in quantum physics and his Franklin Society prize-winning research into beef cattle production, has invented a theoretical design more efficient than the Carnot engine, which had stood for nearly two centuries as the standard for efficiency — an engine so ideal it exists only in theory.